Getting started with affiliate marketing doesn’t require money, but it does require time, patience, and most importantly: consistency and targeted traffic.
Being a successful in affiliate marketing is about working smart, not just working hard.
Learning to be more efficient and more effective in the day-to-day running of your business can pay dividends.
To help you become the super affiliate you know you can be, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best affiliate marketing tools that will help you monetize faster, and pave the way to greater success!
These tools will help you at every step of your journey, from planning your campaign through to the optimization process, while being able to track your performance like a pro!
Table of Contents
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process by which an affiliate marketer can earn a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products. Suppose you find a product that you like to use and then you promote it to others.
What happens then is that every time someone buys it through your reference, you earn a piece of the profit for each sale that the other person or company makes.
Thus, affiliate marketing is, generally, seen as the process of spreading product creation and product marketing across different groups of people, where each group receives a share of the revenue with respect to their contribution.
What Are The Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing?
The most successful affiliate marketers in the world live a life with no set schedules or routines. They live a life that most of us spend our days fantasizing about. But we don’t really have the option to do so, do we? Thus, it only makes sense that these days the affiliate marketing industry is getting more difficult and competitive. It is no easy feat to survive here in this industry and be one of the bests. However, every problem comes with a solution.
The affiliate marketing industry offers tons of benefits over its primitive start-up counterparts. Let’s take a look at some of them:
- Low Investment: Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to create a steady earning flow with almost zero investment. You only need a bit of your precious time and a few bucks to set up a website.
- No Storefront or Shipment: As an affiliate marketer you only have to promote products created by third parties. This means you won’t need to have or manage any kind of a shop, inventory, or any shipment process.
- No Support Team: There is absolutely no need for a support team. Affiliate marketing is the job of simpletons. You can easily manage your website all on your own.
- Generating Passive Income: A successful affiliate marketer has a steady passive income flow. Once you have set up your website successfully, it should be able to generate a profit on its own with very little effort.
- Global Marketplace: One of the coolest and most exciting things about the world of online business as an affiliate marketer is its transparency and availability for all. You can do business and connect with your target audience from any corner of the world when and as you please.
- Working Flexibility: As mentioned above, affiliate marketers do not have set work schedules. They enjoy maximum work flexibility. In fact, they choose and personally construct their schedule according to their will.
However, the road ahead of you becoming a successful affiliate marketer is quite bumpy. You will need a lot of help to reach the pinnacle of success.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing that requires four things in order to work profitably.
- A business that sells things.
- Products for sale.
- Affiliate marketers.
- Customers.
Here’s how affiliate marketing works in a nutshell.
- An affiliate signs up for a company or store affiliate program.
- The affiliate marketer gets a special link for products for sale via the company affiliate program.
- Then, the affiliate recommends the products for sale to an audience of potential customers.
- A potential customer clicks the affiliate marketer’s link and makes a successful purchase.
- The company pays the affiliate marketer a commission of the sale. Commission rates and percentages are explained during the affiliate sign-up process.
As you can see, affiliate marketing is incredibly simple and it doesn’t take much to get started.
Do You Need Money to Start Affiliate Marketing?
No, you don’t need money to start affiliate marketing. You honestly don’t need much at all other than the internet and an internet-enabled device.
“It takes money to make money” – this saying is usually true in most scenarios, but not with these methods for affiliate marketing with no money.
Spending money on your affiliate marketing efforts is something you can do once you start generating commissions to help scale your business. But affiliate marketing is a business that you can legitimately start with zero dollars.
How much can you earn from Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing provides you a performance-based earning. It has no upper limits on our income. So while answering your question that “how much can i earn from affiliate marketing” it is important to highlight that – You can earn a commission each time when you actually drive a sale through your website or blog your maximum earning depends on your sale only.
This commission is also known as advertising fees. There is no specific answer to your question – How much can you earn from Affiliate Marketing.
Every time when a visitor on your blog or site purchases a product through your link, you earn around 2.5% to 60% advertising fees on this sale. In that way, if there is no sale you will earn nothing and in contrary to that if you are able to drive a sale of 1 lakh products in a single night you can earn millions of dollars in that single night.
The Only Thing You Need to Be a Successful Affiliate Marketer
There is one thing and one thing only that you need to become a successful affiliate marketer… and no, it’s not money.
Traffic is the only thing you need to be a successful affiliate marketer. And not just any traffic – you need targeted traffic to your affiliate offers to generate sales and commissions.
But how do you do that? How do you get started with no money and no website?
Buckle up, my friend. We’re about to cover 13 different ways to get started with affiliate marketing that don’t cost a single penny! Plus, we have details on how you can get started as soon as you finish reading this article.
How to Get Targeted Traffic
There are two main ways of getting targeted traffic to your affiliate offers: paid and organic.
Paid traffic is traffic that comes from paid ads and sponsored content.
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List of the Best Affiliate Marketing Tools
Knowing your competition is at the heart of any good affiliate marketing strategy.
Identifying industry trends and gaining insight about competitor campaigns, along with top-performing creatives and traffic sources, is essential if you want to make sure you can hit the ground running.
Following is a list of the various tools that are available online for you to use and build a successful affiliate marketing business. Check them out.
Content Tools
More often than not, affiliate marketers are constantly creating content in some form or another. Whether it’s a blog, email newsletters, social media posts, so on and so forth, hence, it’s vital to ensure that there’s no compromise on content quality. We have mentioned a few recommended tools that can help make your job easy.
Buzz Sumo
Price:
Pro $99/Month
Plus $179/Month
Large $299/Month
Enterprise $499+/Month
Features:
BuzzSumo, is a content research and planning tool that helps affiliate marketers create content that is relevant.
It helps you search the web for trending content that can help make your posts more viral. From articles and blogs to videos and infographics, it provides you insights about various forms of content. What’s more, it can help you analyze a competitor’s content marketing strategy.
BuzzSumo allows you to identify content that resonates with your audience. For instance, you can find the most shared content in the past year or even the last 24 hours.It also helps you identify common topics and popular content formats in your particular niche.
Grammarly
Price:
For Individuals: Free
For Individuals Premium: $11.66/Month
For Teams: $12.50/Month
Grammarly’s web app is quick and easy to launch. You can sign up through Facebook or Google, which reduces the time to create an account. After logging in, the user sees a dashboard view a template and a blank document that she/he can start working on directly.
Features:
There are numerous features that Grammarly brings to the table which help its users fix common grammar mistakes, use phrases that are better apt to the context, and fit the tone of the content. This tool also helps the content creator with suggestions of the proper terminology to cater to the audience it’s meant for.
You as a Grammarly user can gauge your content quality in real-time (as they write) since the web app analyzes the content piece. It gives useful information such as plagiarism and the various metrics (correctness, clarity, engagement and delivery) of the content piece.
DupliChecker
Price:
Free
Features:
DupliChecker is a great free web app that solves the problem pertaining to content quality and plagiarism for most affiliate marketers that write for a blog. Writers can use free features like text analysis, web management, keyword research, IP tools, SEO, Domain Tool and to improve and audit the quality of their content.
This web application is a go-to app for most writers as it’s free and it remains popular among most writers that need to quickly check their content.
Hemingway App
Price:
Online Version: Free
Desktop Version: $19.99
Features:
Hemmingway online editor is another great editing app that doesn’t need a user to register to use the features of this tool. The app has a distraction-free interface and features color-coding highlights on text to help identify types of suggestions in the content.
While the free version of this app doesn’t give users the option to save the document, the paid version not only saves documents but also features the option to directly publish the content on Medium or WordPress. Additionally, you can also export the document in multiple formats (PDF, Microsoft Word, HTML, Markdown, and Text).
Landing pages
Designing landing pages is crucial for affiliate marketers as they play an integral role in the affiliate funnel. Affiliate marketers earn money when webpage visitors complete a verifiable transaction. To do that, you have to create landing pages that attract visitors and convert them to customers. Hence, if the landing page of the product/service lacks aesthetics, functionality, or takes too much time to load, users will likely navigate away from that page. This is a loss to you, as the visitor did not convert to a customer.
This is where landing pages, created from various best-in-class tools, come in handy as they assist in escalating the conversion rate. Any leakage in this process is a direct loss for the affiliate as she/he pays to run ad campaigns to promote certain products/services with the aim to earn commissions.
Instapage
Pricing:
Business $199/month
Enterprise: Customized Plan
Features:
Sometimes it’s better to not reinvent the wheel, that’s how Instapage wins it’s place on this list of effective affiliate marketing tools. It has a library of pre-built landing pages that you can use to sell products/services that best fit your audience.
One of the main features of Instapage is its quick landing page creation that is customized to the type of audience. Instapage calls this process ‘post-click automation’, where you can create ads on Facebook and Google, and then add landing pages that resonate with the ad.
ClickFunnels
Pricing:
Standard: $97/month
ClickFunnels: $297/month
Features:
Within the category of landing page builders and a whole lineup of page builders, there’s ClickFunnel. It’s a sales funnel builder that aims to improve conversion rates for marketers. The reason this web application falls in the category of affiliate marketing tools is due to its focus on improving conversions.
This web app is particularly good for building effective sales funnels, landing pages, integrating affiliate programs, and automating follow-up funnels. You also have the option to request a demo and use the web app’s standard features for 14 days
Unbounce
Price:
Essential: $79/Month
Premium: $159/Month
Enterprise: $399/Month
Features:
If you’re looking to create landing pages with more variety of themes and customizations then this is the tool for you. This web app helps create landing pages that are a carbon copy of the prototype.
Leadpages
Price:
Start: $19/Month
Standard: $37/Month
Pro: $79/Month
Advanced: $321/Month
Features:
When it comes to lead generation, you’ve perhaps sometimes wondered how life could have been simpler if there was a tool that could build landing pages that have a high conversion rate.
Not only does this web app have a repository of beautiful themes to choose from, but these themes are optimized for tablets and smartphones. With Leadpages, you can choose from a variety of templates that serve a function i.e contest/giveaway, event, and sales.
Conversion Optimization Tools
So far you’ve read about affiliate marketing tools that can help write content, create landing pages, and even create sales funnels. It’s time to look at some tools that focus entirely on optimizing conversions to increase revenue earnings.
OptinMonster
Price:
Basic: $19/Month
Plus: $39/Month
Pro: $59/Month
Growth: $99/Month
Features:
OptinMonster provides a comprehensive conversion optimization toolkit to help you grow your email lists and grow conversions. It helps you convert your website visitors into subscribers.
OptinMonster provides all the relevant statistics to guide your decision-making with its analytics and reporting.
Visual Website Optimizer (VWO)
Price:
Experience Optimization Essentials: $467/Month
Conversion Optimization Essentials: $368/Month
VWO Testing: $199/Month
VWO Insights: $169/Month
VWO Fullstack: $1999/Month
VWO Engage: $99/Month
Features:
Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), is a comprehensive A/B testing platform to non-technical users. It’s a great affiliate marketing tool to test campaigns that you can optimize according to your unique needs.
Here are some VWO tests that make it an incredible affiliate marketing tool:
With VWO, you can run website A/B testing and easily add different versions of headlines, buttons, images or any other elements to create multiple variations of your website. It will then track the website and measure revenue, signups, clicks and similar conversion goals. In the multivariate testing mode, VWO combines all the changes you made and creates different designs automatically. This mode allows you to test thousands of website versions at the same time.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is such a successful tactic that affiliate marketers dedicate a lot of effort and thought to creating attractive email drips. Emails are effective at conveying a lot of offers in a simple and attractive package. To help you with the automated management of your email campaigns, I will now mention some of the most popular email focused affiliate marketing tools.
i-AutoResponder
Pricing:
Basic: Free
Essentials: $9.99
Standard: $14.99
Premium: $299
Features:
i-Autoresponder is a popular and comprehensive email marketing automation tool that takes car of all aspects of email marketing and greatly simplifies the entire process.
You can create single or multi-stage email marketing campaigns and add links to third-party websites in your emails. Using preset customized templates, you can get an email campaign ready for action in just minutes.
i-Autoresponder’s campaign builder helps you customize content and design elements to the preferences of your intended audience. Whether you are selling t-shirts or cloud hosting, the tool allows you to craft a message that impresses and converts. .
The web app also takes care of automated transactional emails and removes the pressure of customary tasks such as welcoming the user, re-engaging them and setting up follow up emails.
Once the campaign goes live, i-Autoresponder provides reports on the progress and performance, giving you essential insights on audience engagement and ROI.
Best Targeted Leads
Pricing:
Monthly: $50
Yearly: $500
Features:
Lead generation plays a vital role in landing potential customers into the affiliate funnel. This web app does just that by providing an end to end solution for SMEs and agencies.
BestTargetedLeads offers a dashboard that displays conversions and engagements by the target audience. Additionally, you can also create quizzes, pop-ups, surveys, and customer feedback forms to generate quality leads.
Additional features of this web app include:
- Multivariate Testing
- Customer Engagement
- Landing Page Forms
- Feedback Management
This is the perfect tool to add to the list of affiliate marketing tools because of its growth focus feature set. With BestTargetedLeads, you now have access to easy-to-customize opt-ins that help convert visitors into subscribers.
BestTargetedLeads offers detailed audience intelligence, thanks to detailed information highlighted by tags and segmentation. Segmentation is particularly useful and helps you see your audience in discrete chunks based on readers’ interests, activities, and the most viewed topics. As you can imagine, this information makes BestTargetedLeads the perfect email newsletter tool to be in your affiliate marketing toolkit.
Tracking
Traffic is the lifeblood of the affiliate business. Every time an online user buys a product or service through an affiliate’s link, the affiliate receives a commission. This is why everyone in the affiliate is obsessed with traffic – where are the visitors coming from and what was their “journey” on an affiliate website.
In my opinion, affiliate marketing tools that track traffic and visitor journey are the most useful and the most complex to use.
Google Analytics
Pricing:
Google Analytics: Free
Analytics 360: Custom
Features:
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool that gathers and analyzes visitor data for presentation in the form of detailed reports.
With Google Analytics, affiliate marketers can better understand their audiences and get insights to finetune marketing strategies for better results. While the tool can get very complex, the reports are simple and easy to understand, thanks to on screen help and the host of tutorials available online.
Through Google Analytics, you can track and extract information such as the demographics of the visitors, where they are landing from, and the devices they are using to access your websites.
With the premium analytics, you’ll get access to some amazing features.
- Salesforce Integration
- Ad Network Integration
- Video Views and Clicks Data
- Custom Funnels
- Advances Analysis
1stURL
Pricing:
FREE
Features:
If you’re looking for an innovative, real-time analytics platform for tracking online campaigns, this is a great web app to add to the list of affiliate marketing tools. 1stURL is a powerful option for performance marketers and advertisers who wish to monitor their efforts, campaign progress and profitability.
With 1stURL, your data is safe because the platform is protected by hardened encryption and authentication processes similar to those employed by leading financial institutions.
This affiliate marketing tool is accessible from the cloud and helps advertisers get a near-real time pulse of their activities.
Ad Spy Tools
To stay on top of the competition you’ll need to keep an eye out on how your competitors’ ads are performing. You’ll want to see what makes their ads work and how you can integrate the approach into your campaigns. This approach is what makes Ad Spy Tools an important category in this list of affiliate marketing tools.
AdPlexity
Prcing:
AdPlexity Mobile / Desktop: $199/user
AdPlexity Native: $249
Features:
One of the reasons why experts recommend affiliate marketing tools is to minimize the process of trial and error by developing an in-depth understanding of your niche. AdPlexity is the perfect tool for understanding the traffic on your digital properties. Additionally, you can access data regarding ad traffic sources, the publisher of the offers, and more importantly, similar campaigns that use the same offers.
Additional features include:
- Faster search results
- Wider search filters for mobile, native, and desktop ads
- Directly download ad offer landing pages
- Target Mac, iPhones, iPad, and Android devices
- Live support
The app comes with a navigation bar that presents useful information such as Ad Network, Country, Platform, Language, Category (Native only), Affiliate Network, and a Tracker.
PowerAdSpy
Pricing:
Free Version
Basic: $49/Month
Standard: $99/Month
Premium: $149
Platinum: $249
Titanium: $299/Month
Palladium: $349/Month
Features:
This is one of the big guns out there in the world of ad spy software today. As an affiliate marketer, there are plenty of reasons you would add this to your affiliate marketing tools lineup.
PowerAdSpy provides insights and data from multiple platforms and gathers performance data on the competitors’ ads as well. In particular, PowerAdSpy uses the following channels and sources:
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Social Media
As an affiliate marketer, you already know the vital role social media platforms play in promoting your campaigns. The challenge here is keeping track of the platforms built for a certain purpose and cater to a particular target audience. Keeping tabs on relevant social media feeds can be taxing, hence, it’s a good idea to use affiliate marketing tools that integrate social media platform feeds into easy-to-use dashboards.
Hootsuite
Price:
Professional: $19/Month
Team: $99/Month
Business: $599/Month
Enterprise: Custom
Features:
Affiliates marketers (both individuals and businesses) now maintain active presence at multiple social networking sites. Hootsuite is a great one-stop platform for managing multiple social media profiles without much time investment.
Buffer
Price:
Pro: $15/Month
Premium: $99/Month
Business: $65/Month
Features:
Buffer is a social media management platform for planning and scheduling your content, analyzing results, and increasing engaging with your audience. Buffer helps affiliate marketers and social media marketers collaborate and publish posts more effectively.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engines are the main source of traffic for affiliate websites. This is why affiliate marketers need more than just the working knowledge of optimizing their websites for higher search engine rankings. Since SEO has gone highly technical, SEO focused tools are now considered essential affiliate marketing tools.
SEM Rush
Pricing:
Pro: $99/Month
Guru: $100/Month
Business: $399/Month
Enterprise: Custom
Features:
SEMRush is a great tool for improving website’s visibility. You also have the option to check the “questions” checkbox which will give you all the who, what, why, when, where, and how relates to specific keyword.
SEMrush delivers a wide array of functionality across keyword research, ongoing search crawling, and position monitoring. The platform offers a lot of useful information such as long-tail keywords, the average monthly volume of searches, keyword difficulty, cost per click, and similar information for the keyword.
Ahrefs
Pricing:
Lite: $99/Month
Standard: $179/Month
Advanced: $399/Month
Agency: $999/Month
Features:
If you’re looking for more detailed keyword insights, Ahrefs is a great affiliate marketing tool to have on your belt.
You’ve probably already noticed how the interface appears to be intuitive and offers all the details that marketers and SEO specialists are interested in when optimizing search websites for higher SERP.
With the help of Ahrefs, you’ll be able to perform keyword research from Google, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, Daum & Naver, and Seznam – all at the same time. You’ll also get the power to go beyond search volume and look at data relevant to clicks and impressions. However, the best part is the ability to run a gap analysis at a page level so your website can rank better than your competitors.
LongTailPro
Pricing:
Starter: $37/Month
Pro: $67/Month
Agency: $147/Month
Features:
If you are looking for a keyword research tool that helps you in ranking for long tail keywords, LongTailPro is a great marketing tool to have. It has a simple and straightforward interface which makes it quick and easy to familiarize with.
The web app is packed with great features that can help a beginner find relevant keywords and check competition levels. You, as an affiliate marketer, can benefit greatly from this tool.
- Keyword suggestions in bulk
- Keyword competitive score
- Deep competitor analysis
- Search engine rank tracker
Moz
Pricing:
Standard: $99/Month
Medium: $179/Month
Large: $249/Month
Premium: $599/Month
Features:
Moz is an affiliate marketing tool that’s become an easy pick for the editor’s choice of SEO tools. It’s set the standard for SEO tools and has reviews as part of this roundup and its metrics have become an industry standard.
If you need insights that have industry-standard metrics and suggestions on-page optimization, this is a great tool to work with. The free version of this tool can appear to be less intuitive than others, but Moz manages to set the bar with its keyword research, data, and analytics.
How to get payment from Affiliate Program?
It depends on different affiliate programs, which modes they support to pay their affiliates. But almost all companies use bank transfers and PayPal for deposits.
These terms are often used in the Affiliate program, based on which the commission is given to the affiliates.
1. CPM (Cost Per 1000 impressions): This is an amount that is paid by the merchant to a blogger against per thousand impressions of the product. If 1000 views have taken place, the merchant gives commission to its affiliate partners by CPM method.
2. CPS (Cost Per Sale): This amount is released to the affiliate partner/blogger when the visitor of his blog purchases the products. The affiliate gets a commission corresponding to the number of sales generated.
3. CPC (Cost per click): A blogger gets a commission on this CPC rate when his blog visitor clicks on text, banner or links placed on the affiliate’s blog.
Which are the popular Affiliate Marketing sites?
There are many affiliate marketing companies available to you on the Internet, We will highlight the name of some companies that offers a good platform to its publishers.
Some popular Affiliate Marketing Sites are –
How to Join Affiliate Marketing Sites?
If you wish to join any Affiliate Marketing Sites then you can do it very easily. To do this, you have to fill a form and follow the instructions given by the respective companies on their affiliate page.
For example, If you want to join amazon affiliate, then you have to generate a new account where you need to submit some information about you such as –
Your name, Address, Email Id, Mobile number, Pan Card details, Blog/Website Url (where you will promote the company’s product) and Payment Details like – Bank account number and IFSC.
Once our account is approved the company confirms the same via an email and to create a special link or banner you can log in to their affiliate dashboard.
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